Cisco Cisco Prime Fulfillment Multivendor Service Orchestration 1.0 White Paper

 

 

© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. 

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White Paper 

Accelerate and Simplify Service Design, Creation, 
and Delivery 

What You Will Learn 

Most service providers and many enterprises today have multivendor network environments. Administrators 

manage these platforms with separate vendor element management systems (EMSs) supporting service 

fulfillment, assurance, and billing. However, using an array of point solutions adds time, redundant processes, 

complexity, and cost to network operations. Cisco Prime

™

 Fulfillment Multivendor Service Orchestration (MVSO) 

provides a compelling alternative for service fulfillment in these environments by allowing service orchestration 

across multiple element management systems from different vendors.  

This approach preserves existing investments in infrastructure, element management systems, and management 

processes, while allowing end-to-end service delivery across multivendor environments. Service providers can 

save time, reduce complexity and operational costs, and promote greater efficiencies. Cisco Prime Fulfillment 

MVSO is part of the Cisco Prime portfolio of IT and service provider management products. It automates service 
orchestration across Cisco and other vendors’ equipment, starting with Alcatel-Lucent, and offers easy extension to 

other vendor devices. The solution includes reusable service fulfillment building blocks to automate the fast 

provisioning of popular services, such as those defined by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF).  

This white paper presents the need for and benefits of multivendor service orchestration. The features and 

functional architecture of Cisco Prime Fulfillment MVSO are described, and a sample case study is included. 

Challenges of the Multivendor Environment 

Service providers deploy best-of-class equipment in their networks to reap competitive and cost-efficiency benefits. 

Mergers and acquisitions add to this equipment inventory. These factors eventually result in a broad array of 

different vendor platforms and technologies, from the customer premises to the data center. In addition, each 

vendor platform typically has its own, proprietary management systems. These systems are integrated with a 
provider’s operational support systems (OSSs) and business support systems (BSSs), resulting in separate silos of 

network management functionality. 

Used together, these diverse systems rely on many redundant and inefficient processes that are often manual, 

complex, and error-prone. With many separate management systems for the varied equipment brands, 
administrators rely on “swivel-chair integration” to ensure that a service is properly provisioned and running 

efficiently across the network topology. That means they must move back and forth from one management system 

to another and sometimes write updates to custom program scripts to correct order failures (Figure 1).